My own sense is that there are at least three key elements that should be part of any such narrative:

1. An account of how (and why) the global climate system has varied over long periods, and how humans have responded to its variations in the time we’ve been around.

For instance, knowing about the alternation between “icehouse” and “greenhouse” states, and between glacial and interglacial periods (and the difference between the two!), can help us understand the dynamic planet that gave birth to us. And understanding how micro-changes in those systems have affected human developments, from the spread of agriculture to the decline of civilizations, can help us understand our own dependency on those larger processes.

All of that will help us from overcrediting human agency on the planet. Humanity is, in this perspective, neither an aberration — some evil intruder into an otherwise harmonious world — nor the overarching telos of planetary history. It’s just a species that’s done some unique and marvelous things over a short period of time, a period that may now be ending.

2. An understanding of how fossil-fueled capitalism is distinctive in its scale and its impacts, and especially of how the rate by which the industrial burning of fossil fuels has released certain compounds (carbon and methane) into the atmosphere is comparable to the rapidity of previous “shocks” to the system — such as the asteroid hit that ended the Mesozoic era.

The conjoined term “fossil-fueled capitalism,” or something like it, is important here in that it links a technological development (the burning of fossil fuels) with a set of politico-economic determinants (capitalism) that have conditioned the ways in which those technologies have been deployed for rearranging human life and ecological relations on the planet.

This keeps us from undercrediting human agency with respect to the planet. We live in a time marked by a new geological force, and we need to understand what that force is. It is neither humanity as a whole, nor some random accident (i.e., the discovery of the energy that can be released when coal is burned). It is a sociopolitical-techno-economic system, one that we need to come to grips with.

3. An understanding of the highly differentiated internal dynamics of human society — including political and economic relations, cultural institutions, behavioral propensities (including the cognitive and affective dimensions of “human nature”), and all of these as they have coevolved and interacted over time — that both constrain and enable our capacities to respond to the predicament.

Things get messily complicated here, and understanding them will require not only all the resources of the social sciences and humanities, but also the perspectives of those who have been marginalized within the knowledge industries, from indigenous and traditional/colonized societies to today’s growing global precariat. After all, knowledge is not really knowledge if it’s blinkered by a lack of understanding of how it got to be “knowledge” in the first place, and who gets to call it that. Histories of colonialism and genocide, gender discrimination, and much else, play into that.

In particular, however, it’s essential to understand how currently evident levels of inequality between human groups — including locally as well as globally differentiated socio-economic classes — make it impossible to effectively address the predicament. When some people profit immensely from current relations, at great expense to others, there is little reason to believe that the privileged class will relinquish its privileges.

Understanding these intra-human dynamics will keep us from overestimating the unity in the category of the “human,” and therefore help us to adequately comprehend what “human agency” means today. It’s not about humanity as a singular force that can redirect itself to new goals; we have never been such a unified force. It’s about forging a new humanity altogether, one that has never existed — a “common world” brought together by the current predicament as much as by anything that came before it. That will take a lot of work.

This internally riven humanity can hardly be understood apart from the capitalism that conditions its emergence today (#2 above). Nor can it be understood apart from the divergent relations humans have had, and continue to have, with nonhuman entities, organisms, processes, and systems (i.e., #1, though in a much more local and fine-tuned understanding).

But in terms of the substance of the story, I think these three are worth distinguishing as crucial pieces that are relatively autonomous from each other. We might call the first of these elements “the dynamics of the planet,” or the “deep time” piece; the second one — “the dynamics of capitalism,” or the “now time” piece; and the third — “the internal dynamics of human agency,” or the “becoming-humanity” piece.

There are of course many other things that an “adequate story of our predicament” needs. Most important may be the aesthetic and communicative criteria — which I have not considered here at all.

The triad, like all my triads, loosely follows a Peircian thread. (#1 is what’s given, #2 is the encounter between it and carbon capitalism, and #3 is the realization of meanings that allow for a new mediation to develop.) But I find it useful to think with.

11 Responses

A problem with the phrase “carbon capitalism” is that it by implication gives a pass to major polluters like China and the former USSR, which by their own definitions are not “capitalistic.”

Now one could make a Marxist argument that those societies benefit from capitalism’s rationalization of the means of production (and pollution), or whatever the correct Marxist lingo is, but then what? Do you have to stop in your argument and state that for ecological purposes, Communism is capitalism? That would be fun to wach.

following a sort of proto-pragmatism adequate to what/whom? for me these questions are as much about consequences/receptions as they are about authorial intentions and like the rest of eco-humanities seem to call for some sort of tests (sort of an xperimental-philo if you will).

Chas to the degree that the Chinese government describes itself as communist it tends to be either (and mostly) a reference to the power/domination of their party or a kind of populist appeal to a mythological national identity in the service of said near monopoly, so seems like a non-issue in this matter.

I agree with dmf that today’s China is capitalist (sufficiently, if not exclusively): it participates in the global capitalist economy, and only differs from other countries by having a powerfully centralized authoritarian state. Some would call that “state capitalism.” I think the USSR was a better example of state capitalism, in the sense that it practiced capitalism on a state scale, with a single control structure instead of competing private/corporate owners. (China, by contrast, has private enterprises, but oversees them more strongly than other capitalist states.)

But capitalism does not only operate within states. If anything, the capitalist system has never been merely national; it’s always been global in intent if not in practice.

I guess that if I’m going to use the word, I should provide my own definition of it… For starters, that definition would focus on the way in which things in the world — such as land, trees, organisms, bodies, water, and so on — are converted into capital and/or commodities to be traded in a market environment, with the overall aim of accumulation and growth. That means that those things are disembedded from richer, generally more local, and more multivalent relational networks (e.g., where land is seen as home, territory, extension of one’s self and community, abode of the spirits, etc.) and re-embedded into expanding networks of exchange, with the tendency being to reduce them to their exchange value. The capitalist system, as a network of commodity/exchange value, expands at the expense of other values.

Another approach has always been to say that the USSR, Communist China, et al. were not capitalist, but were industrialist, and that that’s what characterizes the modern world. Industrial capitalism, in that sense, is just a particular form of industrialism. But I think that that characterization overemphasizes the technological dimensions and underemphasizes the sociopolitical and economic.

I’ve used the phrase “adequate to the Anthropocene,” and implied that it should be adequate for understanding “humanity’s current predicament” and for “forging” a “new humanity” or “common world.” But you are right that adequacy can only be measured in its effects…

following Stengers and all I would think it would have to be more a question of adequate to what particular human (ie what researchers) interest/project/etc, not sure that we can grasp the anthropocene without such frames (if ‘it’ can even be said to exist as such without them).
glad we are in agreement about the effects, too much of the academic arguments seem to have fallen into the old rut of a kind of philological genealogy as if the very name/label itself somehow predetermined how people would use/receive it, reminds of when people invoke author-ity to make something so, as if say Deleuze says a movie has such an effect/power than it must and we don’t need to test it.

Adrian writes, “For starters, that definition would focus on the way in which things in the world — such as land, trees, organisms, bodies, water, and so on — are converted into capital and/or commodities to be traded in a market environment,”

I have no problem that, but let us make it clear (as Lynn White, Jr. did fifty years ago), that self-proclaimed socialist and communist systems do exactly the same thing.

Perhaps the capitalist side of the Cold War later drove China and the USSR to ever more intensive despoliation as they tried to keep pace. I haven’t had time to assess that. But that brings me back to the apt “industrialization” phrasing above. And in the end to the question of what enables what: capital>industrialization>technological advancement>capital…)

Regardless of such doubts, I see this line of argument as a vital counterpoint to that of Earth system scientists. And I do believe that Anthropocene – as Jason Moore has put it – “may obscure more than it illuminates.” (And I’m writing this as a member of the Anthropocene Working Group!) – Andy

Hi Andy – Thank for your comments. They (like Chas’s above) show how it’s incumbent on people like me to define our (my) terms clearly. If we define “capitalism” not simply as a competitive marketplace — which seems to be a common (but superficial) understanding of it — but as a political-economic system driven by the pressure to convert land, labor, and almost anything else into productive economic assets, then the Maoist and Soviet models are simply hybrids of capitalist industrialism and authoritarian state command economies. Every nation-state that participates in the capitalist world-economy makes its own compromise between pure capitalist productivism and state (or local) management of general welfare. The Soviet Union and Communist China, by this definition, never really presented an alternative to the capitalist world-system, but only variations in its national organization.

But at the very least, I think we need to somehow indicate that a unified humanity — as suggested by the “Anthropos” of “Anthropocene” — has never really existed as an agent and that therefore we need to supplement it with qualifiers, descriptors, or alternative terms as we try to define what this historical moment is about.